UK Edition
Review
Sensitive, subtle and still the best around: La traviata, Royal Opera, review
Fast approaching 25 years of age after 14 revivals and something like 150 unfailingly sold-out performances, Richard Eyre’s production of La traviata remains the best around and a model of how a great opera house should stage its bread-and-butter repertory.
The designer Bob Crowley’s opulently gilded yet uncluttered evocation of Paris in the 1840s delights audiences with its spectacle and offers value for the eye-wateringly high ticket prices. Eyre’s directorial interpretation is sensitive and unassertive, without any of those sensational gimmicks or ostentatious gestures that tarnish with time; and visiting star singers can be slotted into the moves required without weeks of rehearsal.
Would that Kasper Holten’s five-year regime as the Royal Opera's supremo, now drawing to a close, had yielded another such durable gem.
The show’s latest run (rehearsed by Andrew Sinclair) is excellent in every respect, redeeming the house’s reputation after the dismally dank and limp Il trovatore mounted over the Christmas period.
First among its virtues is the crisply propulsive conducting of that dynamic young maestro Daniele Rustioni. He makes music in the mould of maestri such as Riccardo Muti and Charles Mackerras, so there is no slop or slush in the orchestra here. From the delicately etched Prelude onwards, every note of Verdi’s score is given considered weight and precise colour, with clean textures and firm phrasing avoiding the sentimental or hysterical. Violetta’s tragedy acquires nobility and dignity in the process.
Yet Rustioni’s baton also has a light touch that keeps the singers on their toes without bullying them. I’d have liked more urgent emotional engagement from Artur Ruciński’s Germont and Sergey Romanovsky’s Alfredo, but both of them present fluently elegant legato.
Romanovsky, darkly handsome and slender on his house debut, is something of a find. His voice projects with sweet luminous tone, devoid of the bleat common in Russian tenors, that will endear him to casting departments; his aria was buoyantly dispatched. The chorus sounded in the appropriate party mood, and there were arresting cameos from two of the Royal Opera’s apprentices, Angela Simkin (Flora) and Yuriy Yurchuk (Douphol).
But any traviata will be made or broken by the quality of the soprano who plays the repentant courtesan Violetta. Here she is incarnated by the Lebanese-Canadian Joyce El-Khoury, who has previously sung the role for Welsh National Opera and will sing it again at Glyndebourne this summer. She is already very good indeed and deserved the rapturous ovation that greeted her curtain call. But she could get even better.
Nervously shrill and under-projecting in much of the first act, she warmed to a touchingly hesitant Ah! Fors’è Lui and went on to give an impassioned account of the wonderful dialogue with Germont in Act 2, tugging at the heartstrings in the weary renunciation of Dite Alla Giovane.
Best of all was her extended death scene, in which Addio Del Passato was crowned with exquisitely judged pianissimo vividly depictive of a consumptive’s last gasps of breath.
El-Khoury’s syrupy timbre is most appealing and her stage presence very attractive. But there was something too healthy about her manner. The greatest Violettas of my experience (Ileana Cotrubas, for example) have made one feel that she is doomed from the start, and knows it – that is how she can bear to part with the man she loves. It is Violetta’s physical fragility that makes her moral strength so moving, and as yet El-Khoury doesn’t convey that dimension with much intensity.